Dustin Group AB

STO:DUST

Earnings Call Transcript 2019-Q2

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Q2 report conference call. [Operator Instructions] I must advise you that this conference is being recorded today, Wednesday, 10th of April 2019.I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Thomas Ekman. Thank you. Please go ahead.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone, and most welcome to our second quarter presentation and conference call. Hope you've had a good morning so far. Here on our side of the call is myself, Thomas Ekman; and we have Johan Karlsson, CFO; and Fredrik Sätterström, Head of IR, in the room as well.So today, we present our second quarter where we see a total strong organic growth, driven by our large corporate and public segment, whereas our small/medium-sized business segment faced some slowdown in the first half of the quarter. On the M&A side, we had a high activity with 3 acquisitions announced right off the quarter end. But let's start to go through the quarter in more detail.Going to Slide 2, Dustin at a glance, first. Many of you know us, of course, but just a quick run through over who we are. Dustin is a leading IT retailer with a wide range of hardware, software and related services and solutions to that. We have a centralized warehouse and efficient logistics platform that can ensure fast and reliable delivery to our customers. With the addition of high-level IT expertise and competitive pricing, it enables us to meet the needs and demands of small- and medium-sized businesses as well as large corporates, the public sector and also consumers.94% of our business is B2B and 6% is B2C. Just a little less than half of our sales, 47%, comes from Sweden. And 14 -- between 14% and 18% comes from Norway, Denmark and Finland, respectively, and now also 5% from The Netherlands.We have roughly 255,000 products in our assortment, both hardware and software, and 80% of our sales is coming from online, the remaining 20% or so through our strong relationship sales forces. So overall, we are well positioned in a growing market and are, of course, benefiting from underlying trends, such as the accelerating online market, strong demand for mobility managed services, security and cloud-based solutions. That's us in a glance.Let's move further on then to Slide 3 for some highlights during the quarter. Sharp growth for our large corporate and public segment where, as said, SMB was affected by some temporary effects in the first half of the quarter. On a total level, net sales grew by 18.1%, of which 7.8% were organic and very much in line, of course, with our financial targets. The growth was fueled by completed acquisitions and strong organic growth in LCP with 16.1%. SMB, small- and medium-sized businesses, had -- segment had a total growth of 21.4% and more or less flat organic growth. Consumer sales were down 13.5% organically as an effect of changed consumer behavior, increase in sales as well as our focus on margin for that segment.Gross profit increased to SEK 524 million compared to last year's SEK 420 million. And that gives us a gross margin at 16.3%, up 1 percentage units from last year's 15.4%. Our adjusted EBITA rose 7.3% to SEK 154 million compared to last year's SEK 143 million, and that gives us an EBITA margin at 4.8% for the quarter.The margin, as such, was negatively affected by the sales mix in the quarter with large LCP deals with initial low margin and large volumes giving a lower percentage while, at the same time, SMB, as said, had a weak start of the quarter also affecting the margin. Private label sales, like cables, adapters and displays, continued to make positive contribution in the quarter.Earnings per share increased 19% to SEK 1.41 per share, and our net debt ratio is down to 2.1. And we had a solid cash flow from operating activities at SEK 144 million. Other operational highlights worth mentioning, even though it happened right after the quarter, is, of course, our M&A activity where we announced 3 acquisitions with Inventio in Denmark, Norisk in Holland and Chilit in Finland. We will come back to those later on in the presentation.But now over to you, Johan, and moving on to Slide 4 to take us deeper in the segments and financials.

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

Yes. Then let's have a look at SMB segment on Slide 4. Total growth, as Thomas was mentioning, continued at high level on 21.4%. However, the organic growth slowed down to 0.1%. And the main reason for this slowdown of the organic growth was the long Christmas holiday period affecting the customer activity during this period and also the shortage of PCs in the market due to the delivery challenges from Intel. The segment result improved from SEK 136 million last year to SEK 147 million this year or by 8.1%. Segment margin was down from 12.2% last year to 10.9% this year. Margins were affected not only by the lower growth levels, but also by lower activities in the high-margin project sales business, mainly due to the Christmas holiday effect. As in last quarter, the segment margin was also affected by the non-integrated entities, where all OpEx is considered segment cost and, hence, their segment result equals EBITA. In the quarter, we see continued increase of the software and services sales, and their share is now representing 21% of total sales compared to 13% last year.If we then move to Slide 5 and the LCP segment. LCP is now moving into full swing with a reported growth of 19% and an organic growth of 16.1%. We saw significant effect from the one public deal in Denmark, but also from positive signs in Sweden and Norway. In Finland, we still faced fierce competition, but in comparison to last year's, numbers are more stable now. Sales to corporate customers had similar challenges with volumes at the SMB segment and the growth ended at 3.4% for the quarter.Segment result increased from SEK 93 million last year to SEK 101 million this year or by 8%. Segment margin at 5.9% was down from last year's 6.5%. The main reason for the lower margin was the effect from the newly won public agreements with initially lower margins.If we then move to Slide 6 and the B2C segment. So in the B2C segment, we saw result of a weak Christmas sales, mainly as a consequence of strong Black Friday campaigns moving volumes into November.Total sales was down 11.4%, and organically, sales was down 13.5%. As the volume campaigns were not in the market, segment margin was up as we focused on margin management to compensate for the volume shortfall. Segment margin was up from 5% last year to 6.3% this year, and segment result improved by SEK 1 million to SEK 9.4 million. Overall, a very strong result from the B2C segment.Moving to Slide 7 and net working capital. Net working capital ended at negative SEK 62 million, compared to negative SEK 97 million last year. Accounts receivables and accounts payables were moving in line with the growing business, and we are still benefiting from the prolonged payment terms from some of our suppliers. Inventory increased from last year, mainly as a result of acquired entities, broader assortment and higher volumes in the private label area and larger customer-specific buffer stocks than last year. Also, the PC shortage in the market affected the inventory levels negatively as it forces us to purchase more opportunistic.Moving to Slide 8 and cash flow and CapEx. The cash flow for the quarter was negative SEK 98 million compared to negative SEK 16 million last year. Cash flow from operating activities before change in net working capital was SEK 155 million compared to SEK 118 million last year, mainly coming from investor operative result The effect from change in net working capital was negative SEK 11 million compared to negative SEK 103 million last year.Cash from finance activities was negative compared to last year as we, last year, initiated more borrowings to finance acquisitions.Moving on to CapEx. CapEx as a percentage of sales was at 0.6% this quarter compared to 0.5% last year. In total, CapEx was at SEK 20.6 million this quarter compared to SEK 13.3 million last year. IT development represented SEK 7.7 million, and other investments were at SEK 11 million. And in the other investments group, the majority of this investment referred to investments in equipment to deliver services. It's our view that we are looking at CapEx levels around 0.5% of sales in the coming quarters.Moving to Slide 9 and then back to Thomas.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Thank you, Johan, and over to Slide 9, as said. And just to revisit this, we have shown this before, but to revisit the fluctuations we see in our LCP segment and how we drive ourselves to minimize those going forward.As you can see on the graph, we have, you can call it, closed the loop now. The fluctuations are driven by the available public frame agreements. And as we have explained before, we always are hesitant to drive volume over margin, and we have a selective tender strategy.Public sales stand for around 2/3 of the segment and the corporate sales 1/3 of the segment. And our intention is, of course, to equalize those shares to mitigate the fluctuations.We had a positive growth, as Johan mentioned, in the corporate segment. And total organic growth in LCP was 16.1%. So overall, a good quarter for LCP.Moving on then to Slide 10 and to see our latest acquisitions. First, Inventio.IT, which is primarily a SaaS ERP company aiming towards the Danish SMB market. With Inventio, we will strengthen ourselves in the Danish SMB market. But -- at first, but of course, our aim is to export the model for online onboarding of SMB ERP customers to our other markets as well.Then we also acquired Norisk in the north of The Netherlands. Norisk will give us a stronger market position in the north of the Dutch market as well as give us good confidence in managed services and especially, I should say, aimed towards the health sector and that vertical.And finally, we signed an agreement to acquire Chilit in Finland, which will also strengthen our position in the Finnish SMB market. Chilit is a regionally strong player within managed services as well as good knowledge in hardware sales, making it a strong complement to our already existing businesses in Finland. And as you can see on Slide 11, all these acquisitions aimed to strengthen us within the SMB market, paving the way for us to become a true IT partner with a combination of top-class hardware and service offerings that enables our customers to focus on their core business and for them also to stay in the forefront with our strong offerings.Switching to Slide 12, continuing on this. Having the formula for the SMB market with standardized and predefined offerings, we can also selectively offer those services to the LCP market and, by that, also scale up. For you that have followed us for a couple of quarters, you know that we see big potential in moving up the value chain using our core in selling hardware and advanced products and add-on services getting more share of the wallet as well as higher gross margin. Ultimately, of course, we shall use our strength in our online engine, so we'll also cater for services and make them available online.So finally then moving to Slide 13 before we go into Q&A. So let me just summarize the quarter. We saw sharp growth in LCP, whereas SMB were hampered in growth, affected by temporary effects, as Johan mentioned. Net sales rose 18.1% to SEK 3.2 billion with an organic growth of 7.8% and a gross margin increase to 16.3%.Our adjusted EBITA margin came in at 4.8%, and earnings per share increased nearly 20% or 19% to SEK 1.41 per share. So all in all, an okay quarter, but with a slightly weak beginning for SMB. But in terms of growth for the group, both on a total level as well as organic, we ended on a good note.And by that, we'll -- this conclude our presentation, and we are happy to take any questions you might have. Operator?

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Daniel Thorsson.

[Daniel Thorsson, Research Analyst]

Daniel here from ABG. I have -- I can start with 2 questions. The nonrecurring item of SEK 23 million in the quarter related to -- is that related to any specific acquisitions that you could elaborate a little bit on? And number two, is it possible to understand the development in SMB organic growth during the quarter? Is it fair to assume that we had a negative organic growth in the first half and then a positive in the second half of the quarter and of what magnitude?

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

Okay. I can start, Daniel, by trying to elaborate a bit on the IAC release of, let's say, earn-out provisions. And actually, the way we do that is that we take a percentage of the maximum earn-out as a provision when we acquire a company and put it into the balance sheet. And as time then goes by, we adjust that amount depending on how the company is doing. And actually, that's quite little to do with the actual performance of the company and much more of the ambition of the earn-out. So in this case is we have very ambitious earn-out scales, and that is what we have now, let's say, lowered down to become more realistic and, hence, the release of the IAC.

[Daniel Thorsson, Research Analyst]

Can you say what acquisition it was related to?

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

It was related to the 2 Norwegian acquisitions in Core and Purity.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

And Daniel, over to your second question on SMB growth. Yes, you're right, in the beginning, we had -- or during December, half December and half January, we had a negative growth and then came out in positive growth. We had, as you know, the long -- you can more or less compare the holiday season this year to July month, which a long holiday season. And we also were affected by the shortage we had on Intel processors on computers, which is gone now, so that is good.

[Daniel Thorsson, Research Analyst]

So expectations for the rest of the year in SMB, do you see any temporary effects in Q3? Or should we bounce back to around the historical level we have seen in last 2 years’ organic growth?

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Yes, that's how I -- yes, that's how we see it. Yes.

[Operator]

And your next question comes from the line of Mikael Laséen.

[Mikael Laséen]

Quick questions also on this shortage and Christmas holiday effect. Can you say something about the magnitude? Because it's quite seldom that you have lower sales in Q2 versus Q1 and lower margins.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Yes. The -- as said, it was the -- and you're right, it was a temporary effect in the beginning of the quarter with the holiday season. The reason was that we had also quite strong sales loss in Q2, the last year's Q2, so in comparison to that. But overall, as said, it was a weak beginning and better in the end of the quarter.

[Mikael Laséen]

And this shortage, can you quantify this in any way? That would be helpful.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

I should say it was quite large for the larger segments of the SMB or the larger part, not the smallest one of the SMB. The upper part of the segments -- sorry, the upper part of the SMB segment were affected by that as well as large corporates. And it was seen from -- going on actually beginning in end November, December and in January where we saw the biggest part of those problems. That affected, of course, the delivery.

[Mikael Laséen]

Okay. So how did you solve that?

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Or actually, it was...

[Mikael Laséen]

The shortage with other computers.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Yes. We sell, of course, AMD -- computers with AMD processor, for example. But of course, it becomes -- it was a problem for the market as such that there was a shortage. So we sell a lot of other computers. But for the larger corporates, they are quite specified in their buying, so they want a specific SKU and with the Intel processor. And they were affected somewhat there, but that is now solved from Intel's side.

[Mikael Laséen]

Okay. And this is actually the first time I hear you mentioning projects-related sales within the SMB segment. How was that -- how did that perform in the quarter? And how much of sales is coming from that typical project or revenue stream?

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

You could say that is largely coming from the acquired entities. During the last 4 years, some of the acquisitions that we made are having part of their businesses actually doing project-related, let's say, services sales. And that kind of sales is more related to the customers being present and active and also, of course, our employees putting hours into the project. And the combination of that when we have this long Christmas holiday period was negative during -- basically to the fact that the customers were not working during this period, and hence, all our people were also on holiday the same period because there were no work to be done. So that affected the sales and the projects.

[Mikael Laséen]

Okay. So how much is it of total sales for the SMB segment? Is it 5% or 10%?

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

I would say that it is maybe rather 5%, but at very good margins.

[Mikael Laséen]

And your -- since like you're confident that it's a temporary holiday phenomenon and not something that is cyclical, I mean, fundamental demand maybe being weaker.

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

I think the good part is that, as Thomas was saying, that we actually see the distinct difference between the beginning of this quarter and the ending of the quarter. So we can feel quite comfortable, actually, in the fact that it was temporary and it had to do with the number of working days during Christmas and New Year.

[Mikael Laséen]

And how has Q3 started from that particular period?

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

Actually, as we said before, I think our view is that we are more back to, let's say, the historic growth numbers, and that already occurred at the end of Q2.

[Operator]

And your next question comes from the line of Erik Elander.

[Erik Elander, Research Analyst]

So I just have 3 questions. So first of all, what was the organic growth within the large corporate segment and the public segment within LCP in Q3? Is it possible to divide those 2 numbers?

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

It is possible, but we do not disclose within the segment how the different organic growth parts are. Of course, this quarter, you can say that the public deal in Denmark, for example, and the public deals we have in Sweden and Norway, of course, affects a lot given that the public deal in Denmark is fairly big, and that, of course, affects the organic growth of that part. But -- so the LCP, overall, had a good quarter. Even our large corporate was also -- large corporate was also somewhat affected in the beginning of the -- for the same reason of SMB, in the beginning of the quarter. But otherwise, it was a good quarter for LCP.

[Erik Elander, Research Analyst]

Okay. And then margin differences between large corporates and public, you cannot say about -- something about that either then?

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

You can say that the large -- the public deals -- as Johan also mentioned, the public deals usually have initial low margin when you start off the contract and you set it up and everything starts to work. And then, sort of, after a couple of months, it comes after the normal level of it. So that, of course, also affects the margin that we had large deals with initial low margin in this quarter as well.

[Erik Elander, Research Analyst]

Okay. But on average, the large corporate and public margins are the same over a period of time? Or is it a big difference between the large corporate and public segment in terms of margin?

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

There is a difference between the corporate customers and public customers, and that difference is a couple of percentage points. But it has more to do with the fact that we are able to sell a better product mix most of the time to the corporate customers than we are to the public. Public is very dominated by PCs, and they have a lower margin than, for example, accessories and monitors.

[Erik Elander, Research Analyst]

Okay. Great. And so my last question is what kind of ERP products are -- you invent, you're offering?

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

What kind of ERP product, yes?

[Erik Elander, Research Analyst]

Yes.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Yes. It's NAVISION and C5, Microsoft's products. So they are very focused on small ERP system for small SMBs. And what we like with Inventio is also that the company has a very attractive onboarding for onboarding smaller entities. And that comes back to the slide we show there how sort of the ecosystem for a small company works. But you buy your computers and the next question is, "Okay, I need some software." And then you buy an Office 365, and then you -- then even the smallest companies today have fairly advanced demands when it comes to ERP systems and so -- which is -- which makes it good to have a strong onboarding platform for that.

[Erik Elander, Research Analyst]

Okay. And in the future, you will also be able to offer these kinds of products for your Swedish customers or Danish customers and so on?

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Yes. Exactly, that's the aim of this, to -- and as said -- as you know, when we acquire companies, it's either we see a regional strong player somewhere that can strengthen -- like Norisk, for example, that can strengthen us in a part -- in the northern part of the Dutch market or we find a company like Inventio, where -- which have a product or a service that we can produce and export to our other markets.

[Erik Elander, Research Analyst]

And that will go through the website then, I guess?

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Yes, in -- yes, ultimately, it will. Yes. It will -- it always takes some time to integrate those, though, but that's the whole aim of it.

[Erik Elander, Research Analyst]

Yes. Just how long does it take for it to integrate it, on average?

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

It depends. It depends on how -- it depends -- it differs from -- or from company to company, given that we -- if we have an earn-out with the acquisition, then it usually takes -- the earn-out is usually for 1 year or 2 years. During that period, we integrate. But of course, when it comes to the service as such, then we do that as fast as we can. But it usually takes a couple of months or 6 to 8 months to sort of get things, get the service into our systems and get it up and running. But it differs, of course, from -- it differs from what kind of product or service it is.

[Operator]

We still have 3 questions on the line. And the first one comes from the line of [ Guy Tarnul ].

[Unknown Analyst]

Just 2, please. Firstly, on the Intel. Do you see a catch-up effect now as there's more availability of supply, the delayed orders now being caught up? Is that a benefit at the moment? And then, secondly, on the M&A front. Can you disclose any costs or margins for the recent 3 deals, what you paid for the multiples and margins?

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

The first one -- question there on Intel, there, of course, is a slight catch-up effect on this, but not so that the -- a lot of catch-up, but it's, of course, a good pickup. But we signed deals, but we can't deliver. When you sign a deal and you can't deliver, then you can't invoice. So therefore, the sort of the deals are done, but the customers somewhat wait to get it or we have sold other types of products. But overall, it hampered the growth for the SMB segment as well as the large corporates in the beginning of the quarter as such. But now those issues seem to be solved by Intel, so we have good deliveries of all those computers again.

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

And let's see, the second question was around what we -- payments and margins. I mean, we have -- as you have followed us in the last, let's say, 15 acquisitions, we have paid at around 6x EBITA. And this acquisition -- and usually, the price we pay is higher if the company is at a higher level of recurring revenue, which, if you take the case of Inventio and also partly by the Finnish acquisition in Chilit, they have a relatively higher share of recurring revenues. So we are paying slightly above our own average for these companies, but in line with the similar acquisitions that we have done before. So there is no change in the pricing of these targets. As we can see it, there's no change in the pricing of these targets in the market. And we have evaluated them with the same, let's say, valuation method as we have done previously, meaning that we have paid slightly above 6 for 2 of these acquisitions.

[Unknown Analyst]

Okay. And on the margin side, can you comment about whether these companies have similar margins or whether you have a chance to increase their margins?

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

They have -- as they have a higher share of service sales, they are at slightly higher margin than the Dustin, let's say, hardware operation, which is also quite normal. We believe, of course, that when they come into the -- to our engine, we would be, over time, able to scale on their services and, hence, improve their margins further. But at the moment, they come in with slightly higher margins than the Dustin average, and it's then up to us to capture the synergies through the integration of these companies into the Dustin service platform.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Carolina Elvind.

[Carolina Elvind, Analyst]

So one question on Vincere. So how is the integration going? And also, when do you think you can roll out your online platform there and how much do you think it will cost to do that?

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Thanks. Yes. We -- the integration of Vincere, as you know, we first integrate the companies in Vincere Groep, and that is being -- that is ongoing, and then we will integrate the whole Vincere Groep to Dustin. The online platform that we're launching, as we have communicated before, we aim to launch it during this calendar year, during 2019. And so we'll see that going forward. And the development is ongoing right now and it's going in quite a high pace, but it's also quite a big project, so it's a good run. On investments for that?

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

I think we have a project going for the launch of the online platform. And we are, at this moment, taking cost at around SEK 5 million a quarter for the launch, which we believe that will end at around SEK 15 million to SEK 20 million of investment.

[Carolina Elvind, Analyst]

Okay. And then also a more general question because you've talked about Software-as-a-Service and also other stuff as a service, such as hardware. So how is this work going? And yes, give some color on that.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Yes. It's going well. And we see, of course, the increased demand for that. For us, it's also to combine that -- we sell the services today both online, of course, but also on relation sales. And for us, it is to -- as said before, it is for us to standardize and predefine those services so we can make them available online. And that work is a continuous work, of course, given that it comes with new services. But it goes well, and we see an increase of the amount of that, which is good. Still, though, as you know, our -- majority of our sales is still traditional or what you can say it's hardware sales, which drives good and -- but the complementary sales of service is increasing very good.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Christoffer Bjørnsen.

[Christoffer Wang Bjørnsen, Analyst]

This is Christoffer. It's regarding Denmark. I was just wondering, since Atea did see a 10% growth in the product sales in this season in Denmark during Q4, if you saw any kind of tailwind from that during your quarter. I get that the market doesn't go away, it's just that it increase the business to someone else. And I was wondering if you have been -- seen any benefits on that so far on LCP one.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

I mean the Danish market is -- also saw the drop for Atea, of course. But we are there on sort of our own merits and win the deals on our own merits. So there can be other effects, of course, for Atea, but we haven't seen the same thing as Atea so -- in the market.

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

I mean the large public frame agreement that we won late last year, obviously, had an effect on their sales because we are catching, basically, all PC sales to public customers at the moment.

[Christoffer Wang Bjørnsen, Analyst]

And I was wondering if you saw any positive effect on that especially in the private sector, where that is 10% year-over-year book of revenues in Q4. But also now I'm expecting going into Q1 and the rest of 2019, Atea would be quite aggressive in the private sector as they cut these margins within that business. Would that be kind of a headwind for you guys in 2019?

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Yes. We'll see how that -- we haven't seen that aggressiveness, but it might come in if they turn more towards the small- or medium-sized. But yes, we are more focused on the small- and medium-sized market, so in that sense -- and they are more focused on the larger part of that sales, and they used to sell their service as such. So we'll see how they behave, but we will respond to that, of course.

[Operator]

And the next question comes from the line of Predrag Savinovic.

[Predrag Savinovic, Analyst of Consumer Goods]

You mentioned you had some ambitious earn-outs related to Core and Purity. Do you have other -- I mean you have been active on the M&A side quite a bit. Do you have other with the same structure as well? And how ambitious were these earn-outs? Could you quantify that in terms of growth rates or margins, et cetera?

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

Well, we have similar structures for most of the acquisitions that we made, so that's for sure. Some of them are more -- of course, more ambitious in terms of, let's say, percentage of improvement, depending a little bit on the kind of the business and where they are in their own development curve. I would say that we make this estimate every quarter. And this quarter, we adjusted these 2 companies. There might be adjustments coming in the future, but there also might be adjustments in the other direction where companies are improving and doing better results. So there is no guarantee that they are all going in the same direction as such.

[Predrag Savinovic, Analyst of Consumer Goods]

Okay. Super. And on the LCP segment, could you maybe quantify, I mean, the size of the framework agreement in terms of revenues? And how much does that account for the organic growth in the quarter?

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

I mean I think we have communicated that the frame agreement is estimated to give you about DKK 500 million of sales a year. And this quarter was, I would say, proportional to that.

[Predrag Savinovic, Analyst of Consumer Goods]

All right, super. And then, I think, you also mentioned that services and software sales were up in the quarter, which is, of course, usually associated with the higher margin. And the gross margin develops well, but you have -- I mean, on EBITA, it's lower year-over-year. I mean have you increased sales cost, for example, expanded sales force? I mean could you comment a bit on this development?

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

In general, there are 2 effects. One is, of course, that we have increased the public sales in this public frame agreements, which has a negative effect, let's say, on margins. But -- and the other one is that the cost structure is slightly different in the service -- on the services side where you see very high gross margins. But then delivery and sales costs are significantly higher than in the hardware business. So cost as a percentage of sales is going up, yes. But that should in a normal -- I would say, in a normal quarter which doesn't have this impact of the holiday season would give you a higher EBITA margin, and that is really one of the cornerstones in our margin improvement strategy. Even though that -- when we have a situation like this where we lose volume, we still have more or less the same cost structure. So in this quarter, it has almost -- has a bit of a negative effect actually on the margin. But in a normal quarter where volumes would have been normal, you would not have seen the increased cost as a burden. You would actually see it as a possibility to improve EBITA and EBITA margins.

[Operator]

And the last question comes from the line of Daniel Thorsson.

[Daniel Thorsson, Research Analyst]

I have 3 final questions. First, have you seen any new competition within the SMB segment emerging lately? Secondly, are there any new large product orders to reach the market in the fall that you are aware of that could affect your business before summer from a wait-and-see behavior, from either large corporate, SMB customers? And then a final one on cash flow. Regarding net working capital, for how long time do you think you will remain in a positive position towards suppliers?

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Good. Thank you. The first question, on the SMB market, no, we don't see any specific move from other players in the SMB market. The competition is, as usual, quite fierce. But it -- and as you know, our market consists of a lot of small players. It's a very fragmented market, so there's a lot of small players. We see an increase in the demand for buying things online in the corporate market, which is good for us. But as said, no specific such as -- the competition is as it has been before. On the other part, on the SMB market, if there comes any larger deals, there are always, of course, big contracts and so forth out in the market that we compete for. However, we, on the SMB market, as you know, that's -- then you don't have sort of -- the tenders are not visible in the SMB market as such, given that the companies don't work like that when they buy stuff. So not specifically, but we aim, of course, to take all the deals that are good in margin and good in volume for us when we select what we hunt for.

[Daniel Thorsson, Research Analyst]

I may have used the wrong wording on that question, though. So I was -- I meant are there any new products coming out in the market, hardware or software, new Microsoft Office or whatever in the fore that could affect May and June offering -- orders from a software customer saying that, "Okay, we wait until October and then we order the new product." That was the question.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Okay. Sorry.

[Daniel Thorsson, Research Analyst]

No problem. No problem.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

But no, not specific actually. And that is also quite a good thing actually because then, as you know, the more online the market goes and it's -- the more you buy services online, the more you sort of have -- we will not see as we saw before, for example, when Microsoft launched a product, then we saw a big jump in demand, for example. But that comes gradually now, which is very good. So not in that sense. We had some product launches on our Dustin Expo, some European launches. That was good, but that was more on the hardware side. So there are new players coming in, which is good for us.

[Johan Karlsson, CFO & VP Finance & Business Support]

Yes. And I think, on the working capital question, there, you'd say that we don't see any signs of changed behavior there from our suppliers, but we have only, let's say, contractual commitment with them for a quarter-by-quarter forward. So on a quarterly basis, we know that we have the longer payment terms for another quarter, but we don't see any signs that, that would change in the near future.

[Operator]

We have no further questions at this time. You may continue.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Okay. Very good. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening in, and have a continued good day. And we look forward to see you all further on here. Thank you.

[Operator]

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you all for participating. You may all disconnect.

[Thomas Ekman, President, CEO & Acting VP of Supply Chain]

Thank you.